In the U.S. healthcare environment, in which hospitals may operate near, at, or sometimes over capacity, beds are a vital resource to be managed. In order to find an appropriate bed for a patient requires specific knowledge concerning current status of beds in a facility and also requires manual matching of clinical and non-clinical needs of a patient with appropriate beds. In many facilities, a variety of factors contribute to delays in recording patient discharges and transfers, so the most appropriate bed for a given patient may be one that is not recorded in the healthcare information system as being available. It is desirable a care provider knows the specific attributes of individual beds, availability of the individual beds and the specific clinical and non-clinical needs and requests of a patient and care providers involved.
Known healthcare information systems typically provide a list of unoccupied beds without associated attributes. Therefore in known systems, if a user wishes to locate a bed with specific characteristics, both manual intervention and predetermined knowledge on the part of the user is needed. Further, known systems fail to provide an automated process of matching patient clinical and non-clinical needs with the known available beds and fail to support comprehensive healthcare workflow involving patient placement. Known systems are also typically unable to automatically prioritize and select available beds based on patient needs and are reliant on user skill and experience and do not improve the selection of beds using automated intelligent bed searches and generation of prioritized lists of available beds for matching patient needs with bed availability. In known systems, a user needs to manually determine clinical and non-clinical needs by asking a patient and reviewing stored patient information. Known systems involve manual collection of data, personal knowledge of attributes of available beds and may involve contacting a nurse responsible for a candidate bed to acquire attribute information.
The number of steps involved in known manual patient bed management systems varies based on user personal knowledge of individual bed status and characteristics in a facility and the number of phone calls that need to be made to acquired such information. Known systems involve a user in manually recording patient bed requirements and manually matching attributes of a bed with a patient bed requirements. A system according to invention principles addresses these burdens, deficiencies and related problems.